Dressed For the Funeral in Black and White

The Happy Workers

***

There was a vein in the forehead of William T. Spears that throbbed every time he was furious. When the fury was aimed at him, Ronald liked to time the intervals between each twitch. He suspected that one day, if they got too close together, Ronald might actually see his boss’s head explode.

It hadn’t happened yet, but if there was a time when it might, the day might finally be upon them. Ronald, unfortunately, was not close enough to time the countdown, ducked as he was behind a decorative fern outside William’s office. But the office had a clear glass wall and door, so he could see everything that happened inside, albeit without any sound.

William, it appeared, was really laying it into the head of Ronald’s collection division team, Grell Sutcliffe. While Vein Count was off, William’s colouration was still questionable: his face had ranged from eggshell white to a slightly concerning purple over the course of their conversation. He stood rigid, moving only with the force of the words exiting his mouth, only raising his hand from his side to push the glasses up on his nose. Grell, as a complete opposite, was making good use of the space: pacing between William’s immaculately kept desk and the door, using sweeping arm gestures to illustrate her points (accentuated by the scarlet coat she wore casually off her shoulders, and Ronald would have to tell her as such later), and flipping her long red hair at just the right moments. If Ronald didn’t know better – and honestly, maybe he didn’t – he would have thought Grell had rehearsed the entire thing in the mirror the night before. She had always claimed to be an actress, and the longer Ronald worked with her, the more he believed that Grell would make any setting her stage.

“Knox! What the hell are you doing?”

The gruff voice behind him severed Ronald’s concentration and out from behind the fern he stumbled, whirling around to greet his assailant. Another drone from management, Ronald couldn’t recall his name, but they all had the same pale, pinched look that made them more or less indistinguishable to him. Ronald straightened out of habit.

“Haha, nothing, sir!” He saluted comically and flashed a disarming smile, but that did little to appease his superior.

“Precisely. Get back to work before I have to give you a citation.” The drone pushed past him, clutching a bugling file of paperwork under one stiff arm. Ronald watched him go and shuddered.

He cast a final forlorn glance in the direction of the office – Grell was now perched on the edge of the desk, much to William’s chagrin, it seemed – and headed back in the direction of his cubicle, hands jammed into the pockets of his suit trousers.

The hallway emptied into a giant room with a sea of cubicles, all occupied by suit-clad, busy-looking reapers, either scritching with fountain pens on their stacks of paper, or clack-clack-clacking away at typewriters. Human deaths generated an unbelievable amount of paperwork, and even more so when something abnormal happened. Right now, everyone from the London division was frantically trying to catch up.

Ronald flopped down unhappily in his chair and stared at the mountain of paper on his desk, piled so high he could barely see over it. He shifted the mass to his right, so that he still had a clear view of the hall. He checked his wristwatch – so much handier than a pocket watch, which was why he’d picked it as his Christmas bonus item a decade or so back – and pursed his lips, trying to guess how long it would take for his team leader to make a dramatic exit from William’s office. Prediction: three minutes, tops.

Till then, he had to look busy. Ronald slouched in his seat and rubbed one eye underneath his glasses. The London division had never dealt with a deserter since he had started working here and things were currently a hot mess, in his opinion. First there had been the question of jurisdiction: the former reaper known as Undertaker had never done any reaping in England at all, but rather somewhere in the far East, China or Japan, Ronald couldn’t remember, so long ago there were barely any records of him. The point was, no one over there wanted to claim responsibility for him. So then it had fallen on the Britain divisions to pick up the slack – London specifically, it had been decided, because Undertaker had committed the most of his atrocities there. London had been forced to include the incidents on the Campania as well, given that there was no Middle-of-Nowhere-in-the-Atlantic division. Add that Ronald had been one of two reapers dispatched to deal with that anomaly and discovered the whole shebang, and the end result was that he now faced more paperwork than he would be able to complete in his life, let alone by deadline on Friday.

And that wasn’t even what bothered him about the whole business.

Ronald was in the middle of lamenting the IT department’s decision not to lend them computers to deal with this crisis (which weren’t even slated to be invented for another sixty years and not fit for personal use for at least thirty after that, they claimed, and therefore were too much of a drain on the department’s resources to install and maintain), when the door to William T. Spears’s office flew open and out stormed Grell. Right on time. The exit was just as dramatic as Ronald had been hoping: back straight and regal, the hair and coat flowing almost as one, high-heeled boots stomping on the floor to alerted everyone to her disapproval. Several office reapers lifted their heads and stared. Ronald almost clapped.

Instead, he took it as his queue to get up and follow her. The staring reapers turned to glowering ones and they returned to their work with a shake of their heads. No one in their department was pleased with the Sutcliffe and Knox duo this week.

Ronald caught up with Grell right as she was scooting in her chair at her own desk. The team leaders got their own alcove away from the drudge workers, with cubicles with higher walls for the illusion of added privacy. They were just the perfect height for Ronald to drape himself over.

“Hey, boss lady. What’s the word?”

There were people in the department who considered Grell Sutcliffe to be something of a recurring office joke. It started, apparently, before Ronald worked there, when one day Grell decided he was no longer a man and asked everyone to treat him – her, now – as a woman. Or at least that’s the story Ronald was told. Some claimed she was doing it for attention, others thought she was cracking under job pressure, even more still had harsher words that Ronald personally thought they should be above using, being reapers, not humans.

The situation was exacerbated when, several months ago, Grell had cracked under the pressure. Ronald still didn’t know all the details, but there was something about being in cahoots with a human woman and reaping souls who weren’t on the death list. Very scandalous stuff, naturally, which had resulted in a lengthy suspension. The opinion of some was that she should not be allowed to return at all, let alone into a position of power, limited as it was. Ronald thought this was also unnecessary, given how long Grell had been in the department and knew what she was doing, and besides – this place was no picnic. Sometimes Ronald wanted to mow down people who weren’t on the death list, either. (A few faces in management popped into his head when he considered it, actually.)

Somewhere in there, Ronald had become one of Grell’s few supporters. He had started calling her “boss lady” long before the suspension, to let her know he was fine with the being a woman thing, and now he stuck with it to let everyone else know he still respected her authority.

“Oh, there are many words, Ronald,” Grell replied.